Born (1939) and raised in St. Louis, he has degrees from St.
Louis U. (B.S), Stanford (M.A.) and Iowa (M.F.A.). With
David Jauss, he co-edited Strong
Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (Harper
& Row, 1985).

The father of three grown children, Emmett, Austin, and Fay,
he served
in the Peace Corps (Nigeria, 1963-1965) and taught at Miles College,
Birmingham, Alabama, in 1966. For thirty-five years a
resident of Minnesota and English professor at Southwest Minnesota
State University, Marshall, he moved in 2004 to New York City, on
Manhattan's
Upper West Side, and in 2012 returned to Minnesota to live
with his partner, poet Alixa Doom, by Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis.

Dacey is included with one hundred and eleven other writers, both
living and dead, on a recently published (2013) literary map of
Minnesota produced by the Minnesota Historical Society in conjunction
with the Minnesota Book Awards.

Poems appear in various recent anthologies: Indivisible: Poems
for Social
Justice (Norwood House Press, 2013), Bigger Than they Appear:
Anthology of Very Short Poems (Accents Publishing, 2011), Killer Verse:
Poems of Murder and
Mayhem (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2011), When Last on the
Mountain: The
View from Writers Over 50 (Holy Cow! Press, 2010), Eating the Pure
Light: Homage to
Thomas McGrath (The Backwaters Press, 2009); Don't Leave Hungry:
Fifty Years of
Southern Poetry Review (U. of Arkansas Press, 2009) The Pushcart Book
of Poetry: The
Best Poems from Thirty Years of The Pushcart Prize (2007), and The Book
of Irish American Poetry
From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre
Dame, 2007).

Won First Prize in the 2007 "How the West Side YMCA Has
Positively Impacted My Life" Essay Contest (New York City). Also
won The Ledge Magazine's 2009 $1000 First Prize in Poetry for his poem
"The Spiel."